Fisch Can't Swim

Our seminar this week was particularly interesting – I especially liked the discussion related to online identity.

I’d like to explore Sherry Turkle’s TED talk a bit more, as it didn’t explicitly get talked about in class (also bringing in a bit of extra reading and info from my sociology class.) While I hadn’t seen this exact TED talk video before, I had read some of Turkle’s articles and portions of her book Alone Together. We could consider Turkle a cyber-dystopian, one who is skeptical or cautious about technology’s role in our lives. (Interestingly, she says in the beginning of her talk that she was previously a cyber-utopian, praising the possibilities for transforming one’s identity using the medium of the internet.)

She’s definitely onto something in her wariness of technology ­– in both the video and in some of her more recent articles she describes our inability to no longer have meaningful face-to-face conversations because we choose to be engrossed on our screens (phones/iPads/etc.) instead of in the person standing before us.

While I can think of a few instances where conversations have been interrupted by a friend’s quick peek at a phone, this issue doesn’t seem to be nearly as widespread as Turkle thinks. She seems to suggest that this is an epidemic taking over the country, based purely on interviews and some observations she has made (for instance, mothers walking down the street pushing their children in strollers are now looking at their phones instead of talking with their kids – Turkle argues that these mothers must have been talking with their children before phones and portable technology came along, but this conclusion doesn’t seem particularly well-grounded in data.)

In fact, other researchers (and former colleagues of Turkle) have concluded that technology use actually brings us together and further connects us, far more than it drives us apart. Keith Hampton, a professor from Rutgers, studied homes in the late 90’s that received high-speed Internet. His finding suggested that this new technology seemed to further connect the houses’ inhabitants rather than isolate them. In a more recent study, he also video-taped four major public spaces in the Northeast (the steps of the Met Museum and Bryant Park in New York, Downtown Crossing in Boston, and Chestnut Street in Philadelphia) to observe whether members of groups in public used their phones, instead of talking and interacting with others. When reviewing his footage, he noted that the percentage of people using their phones was quite low (only three to ten percent, far less prevalent than Turkle suggests in her research) and that the people using phones were usually alone. People in groups tended not to be using their phones while spending time with each other, and he concludes that mobile phone usage does not negatively contribute to our social interactions to the extent many suspect.

I think it’s interesting to explore the back-and-forth of opinions on whether phones and other communicative technologies help to bring us together or act to drive us apart. We should be mindful of technology’s role in our daily interactions but perhaps not as skeptical as Turkle suggests.